Appearing on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, Representative Jeb Hensarling and Senator Kent Conrad discussed their work on the bipartisan Debt Commission and what both legislators see coming out of the endeavor.
For Conrad, the devil was not in the details of the findings but in the formation of the commission in the first place. He was an advocate for Executive involvement and stated that he believed the commission failures, if it had them, were a result of the President not having representation on the panel.
And then there’s Jeb Hensarling – the most beige/vanilla Congressman I have ever listened to in my life. At one point he dropped the phrase “fiscal insanity” and I thought he was going to ask Wallace to “pardon his French.” I will commend him however, for giving me the greatest insight I’ve come upon in months as to how screwed up things really are in Washington when he called the Debt Commission an “Adult Bipartisan Conversation.” What the hell was the rest of the talking then? Childish Partisan Arguing? Adolescent Self-Interested Fighting? Thank you Congressman for confirming my assumptions.
As to Conrad’s point, I have to agree with him. What is the point in having a debt commission if the Executive Branch with the veto power has no role in the process? What is the point in spending months on drafting a proposal if the President ultimately has the final say – should he find himself in a position to disagree with the findings?
In fairness to Hensarling, he did offer the only point worth taking away from this interview with Wallace – both Houses could call for a vote on the Commission’s findings tomorrow if their respective leaders so desired. The Commission was an arbitrary, non-binding, side-show orchestrated in a clever attempt to pay lip service to the issue of our nation’s debt. When the geniuses in the room decided to create this wonderful little forum for “Adult Bipartisan Conversation” they knew what the result would be – absolutely nothing; and that is what it produced.
[...] Jeb Hensarling: The Debt Commission was an “Adult Bipartisan Conversation” [...]
This commission report isn’t worth the paper its probably not even written on. Why waste months working on a report that no one was ever going to agree with? Spending Tax payer time and money to figure out how to save money is almost as bad as hearing that this was the first adult conversation.